Oh my! Here I am coming up on 5 years and 400hrs., WITH NO BRAKE SPRINGS and I didn't know I had a problem!!!!! ???Wonder why I still have the same tires I started with??? (No wonder they're going bald----)

Resurrecting an old thread. It appears that I'm experiencing dragging brakes, so I'm going to try putting springs on to see if that helps.

So here's a dumb question, based upon the above parts list. How are you getting the spring which has an inside diameter of .406 over the flange that the outside diameter of .5?

I didn't pay attention to the dimensions and blindly ordered them off McMaster Carr. When I got the springs, they appear to be too stiff (or I'm too weak) to uncoil the ends a bit to get them over the flange end.

For the folks that used these parts, how did you accomplish getting the spring over the flange?

I've got .5 ID springs on order, but since this was a long thread several years ago, I'm curious on how people accomplished the task.

If you have the Matco cylinders as we use on the two seat'ers, we have just been using the repair kits from Van's. They have a new spring in them along with all the new seals. I take the old springs and put them around a bolt, then roll them on a steel plate or such and peen them with a small ball peen hammer while rolling them to let the spring swell to the size that goes around the piston shaft. Then we put a 1/8" thick nylon washer down at the bottom of the shaft on top of the cylinder top. And then use a set screw caller to hold the spring with some ( just a little ) pressure on it. So it will return to the top of the travel every time. Just kid of what we found to work and it does very well.
Yours, R.E.A. III # 80888

I found that when I rebuilt my Matco master cylinders last year, I no longer needed the external shaft springs I had installed the year before. I assume that the cylinders were original to the build in 2000; I didn't find any documentation that they had been changed or rebuilt. I also found that the shaft had deformed, which caused the leak at the top of the assembly that was the reason for the rebuild.

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